How Yotam Ottolenghi built a restaurant empire and became a global publishing phenomenon

Yotam Ottolenghi (left) with business partner and co-author Sami Tamimi: Despite having grown up Jerusalem, 'I realised I'd never been fully aware of the immense diversity of its food cultures.' Photograph: Keiko Oikawa

Interview by Jenny McIvor

Friday 31 August 2012 18.00 EDT
First published on Friday 31 August 2012 18.00 EDT

It could all have been so different. "If you had asked me 15 years ago what kind of food I would like to cook if I were to become a proper chef, I'd have said very fine, finessed, Michelin-starred." Happily for anyone who's ever eaten at one of Yotam Ottolenghi's five London places or cooked from his books (his first, Ottolenghi, is in Amazon's top 10 best-selling cookbooks ever), the Michelin-star plan unravelled.

He did try it, on the pastry section at The Capital in 1997 after abandoning a career in Israel as a journalist and academic, but "I realised that that type of very structured cooking wasn't my style."

By the time, two years later, he met fellow chef Sami Tamimi – like him, from Jerusalem, though from a Palestinian rather than Jewish background – he had discovered precisely what that style was. The pair, along with two other partners, opened the first Ottolenghi in 2002, serving a joyous riff on the Levantine way of eating: exuberant, sunny flavours, simple but inventive combinations, and a sense of abundance and generosity.

Success came immediately, and over the next decade they opened three more branches of the eponymous deli/cafe brand, plus the slightly more glossy Nopi. Along the way, Ottolenghi breakfasts have come to define a new blueprint for the ideal way to start a weekend, and Ottolenghi recipes the default option for aspirational dinner parties. It's also made Mediterranean and Middle Eastern ingredients such as za'atar, freekeh and sumac, if not quite store-cupboard essentials, less likely to be confused by British home cooks with 1970s prog-rock albums. Still, while most enjoy the food-nerd thrill of using such obscure ingredients, they trigger indignant frustration in others. "Readers complain when they can't get hold of something at their local supermarket," he says, "but I always write with the home cook in mind, and often say what to use as a substitute. And if I didn't use more unusual ingredients, people wouldn't read me. Every era has its own list of ingredients that are considered exotic and then, 15 years later, they're not."

His third book, Jerusalem (number three in Amazon's food and drink chart even before its publication next week) offers a little less cause for consternation, because, says Ottolenghi, it features just one curveball ingredient: date syrup. "It comes from Syria and Lebanon, and has a deep, fruity sweetness. It's great drizzled on roast veg or hummus-like purées." It's also likely that chard's ubiquity in the book will see it surge in popularity in the way cavolo nero did after the first River Cafe Cook Book.

The new book grew out of a BBC documentary he filmed on Jerusalem's food culture, and returning to the city that so shaped his own and Tamimi's approach to food was an important milestone. "I last lived there over 20 years ago, so it was interesting to go back and look at it with the eyes of a chef. I realised I'd never been fully aware of the immense diversity of its food cultures."

Similar programmes on Marrakech, Tunis, Istanbul and Tel Aviv are planned, but, disappointingly for his devotees outside London, Ottolenghi's future doesn't include new openings beyond the capital. "How we run the restaurants, with one of the four of us visiting each location every day, I don't see how we could control quality in the same way from a distance."

The way his recipes are so exhaustively tested doesn't lend itself to a hands-off approach, either. "Every recipe has been microscopically analysed – does it need a hint less of that, a hint more of that?" He laughs: "I used to have a very unmediated experience of food but, because of the recipe testing, I've lost that now. I can't switch it off even when I'm on holiday."

Nor, despite a decade of success, can he switch off the anxiety when he walks into one of his places and sees it's not hummingly busy, "That never entirely goes away. I still have it, and I think it's right to have it if you're not to become blasé."